Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Thu, 18 Jul 1996 11:07:24 -0500 | From | "Andrew C. Esh" <> | Subject | Re: 2 thoughts. . . |
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>>>>> "David" == David S Miller <dm@neteng.engr.sgi.com> writes:
David> Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 08:09:18 -0500 From: "Andrew David> C. Esh" <andrewes@cnt.com>
David> Hardware, and engineers willing to help us port Linux to David> their platform.
David> Hellooooo...
This is kind of rude, especially since you can't be sure of what I meant. Do we have to nitpick each other's wording, now?
Maybe what I should have said was "... help us [continue to] port Linux to their platform." That would have left no doubt that I am already aware that there *is* a port. The subject of the sentence, and the point of the whole paragraph, is that I think it would be nice if we got along with Sun as well as we seem to with Digital.
David> Linux port is already done and has been for David> some time, we coded circles around SunSoft in the course of David> one year and we blow away Slowaris and StunOS hands down David> performance wise according to lmbench. And whatever Sun David> based platforms don't work yet, don't worry we'll get the David> hardware, we've been doing fine so far. (it even runs on David> Sparc based multicomputers such as the Fujitsu AP+)
This seems to say that we "Don't need no steenking Sun Engineers to help us!" :) If that's the case, fine. I wasn't suggesting we did. The fact that Sun does not seem to be forthcoming, as Digital is reputed to be, is merely an illustration of the relationship.
It is my opinion that we do need to be working with Sun as much as possible, as long as we don't take a back seat to Solaris. The reason is, Sun is not going to stop selling their hardware over night, so there will continue to be a large installed base which could be a potential market for Linux.
We also need the hardware developers to provide us with high-end platforms upon which Linux can be used for more interesting applications than simple ISP servers, for example. One such company is SGI. I'd like nothing better than to have an SGI running Linux, cranking out movie frames for something like the Toy Story movie. Considering the CPU needed to render high detail VRML spaces, I should think we would be past considering the PC to be a reasonable platform for VRML development. So, Linux needs to be everywhere. (Who knows something about the BeBox? :)
Maintaining Linux on a number of different platforms is an ongoing process, which is best served by having current information about the hardware. I remember the problem we had getting technical information from Diamond Multimedia, in order to add support for their video cards to XFree86. Their unwillingness to help us cost both of us time, and effort, and benefitted no one. Now that they have provided us with what we needed, we have Viper support, and Diamond is selling their cards to Linux users. If Sun were to introduce a new box, it would not be very fun if they pulled a "Diamond" on us, and refused to tell us any technical information outside of user space. This smacks of the copyrighted System ROM deal that has until recently kept the Macintosh to a single point of supply. Thankfully, OpenBoot seems to be an indication that Sun will never do this.
We don't want to contend with Sun, as long as we want to run on their hardware. What one person who responded to my first posting pointed out, is that we should be concentrating on contending with Win NT. It would be a shame if people were to have to put some money in Bill Gate's pocket in order to discover that what they really want is Linux.
David> Check out:
David> http://www.geog.ubc.ca/sparc
Yes, thank you.
Again, remember that everything I am talking about here is all based on net-say, so it may all be untrue. These opinions are mine, as well. I don't speak for anyone.
And I think at this time that enough has been said.
-- Andrew C. Esh mailto:andrew_esh@cnt.com http://www.mtn.org/~andrewes - ACE Home Page
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